Decision Asset · Template
Observability Playbook Template
Reduce MTTR with documented response workflows for every critical alert.
Alerts fire at 2am without playbooks
An alert fires. The on-call engineer spends 30 minutes triaging, guessing what to do. The customer is down for 45 minutes. A documented playbook would have cut MTTR in half. Not having one costs you.
Five essential sections
1
Alert summary
- ✓ Alert name: What fired
- ✓ Service/system: What's impacted
- ✓ Customer impact: What users experience
2
Triage steps
- ✓ Check dashboard [link]
- ✓ Review recent deployments [link]
- ✓ Check upstream dependencies
- ✓ Examine error logs [query template]
3
Common causes & fixes
For each likely cause:
- ✓ Symptom → Investigation → Fix
- ✓ Links to relevant dashboards or tools
- ✓ Expected outcome after fix
4
Escalation path
- ✓ If unresolved in 15 min → Page on-call engineer
- ✓ If customer-impacting → Notify incident commander
- ✓ If data integrity risk → Notify VP Engineering
5
Recovery actions
- ✓ Mitigation steps (rollback, scale up, etc.)
- ✓ Verification (smoke tests, metrics return)
- ✓ Post-incident: log ticket, schedule postmortem
Example: "API Latency High"
Alert: Payment API P95 latency > 5s
Impact: Checkout flow slow, abandonment risk
Triage:
- Check payment service dashboard [link]
- Review recent deployments [link]
- Check database connection pool utilization
Common causes:
- • Database query timeout → Kill long-running queries
- • External API degradation → Enable circuit breaker
- • Memory leak → Restart service
Escalate if: Unresolved in 15 min → Page backend lead
Implementation
1
Create for critical alerts
Start with your top 5-10 alerts that cause incidents
2
Link in alert definitions
Paste playbook URL in alert description so engineers find it fast
3
Update after incidents
Every postmortem should improve the playbook with new learnings
4
Review quarterly
Retire outdated playbooks, add new ones as your system evolves